I replayed the game recently and would like to phrase my thoughts on the game:

On the plus side, I really enjoy the general engine of the game. You have a lot of ways to design a map, make much more use of positioning than in most tactical RPGs and having variable attacks gives classes and characters a lot of flavor. The map editor is also easy to use and let me have fun making various multiplayer maps.

However, the campaigns both felt rather weak. The Vengeance of Emma Strider had some nice ideas, but the execution was rather bland. I'm not very fond of dark and serious stories, mostly because the characters tend to become too much alike and many writers refuse to let positive and fun things happen. The character interactions in the campaign were only mildly interesting at best and forgettable at worst. Also, the maps are obscenely oversized, it takes a lot of turns just to get to the next batch of enemies. It doesn't help that the AI plays rather slowly and attack animations can't be turned off. After the rescue Meridian mission, it became so bad that I stopped altogether.

Guard Llama is much shorter, but it's overall still not very good - while I admit that I liked Lorenzo (particularly the Llama puns), most of the 'humor' is simply repeating tropes and claiming they're funny because they're blatantly spelt out. The final map also has the trouble of being rather big and taking a while to traverse - it's also easy to die to the final boss when not moving properly, making this lengthy map rather grueling. However, it having a puzzle map, a more unique main character and a legit funny ending makes it the better campaign overall.

I know I should finish the main campaign to properly review it, but it was so painfully long and tedious that I just couldn't do it. Not to mention that permanently crippling/losing units for a single mistake magnifies this problem even more.

There's a few story breaking elements that can be fixed in a few ways:

1. Just let story-central characters who are not the striders get wounded instead of them dying so they can't fight but still contribute dialogue.

2. Create an NPC like Biff the Understudy whose sole purpose is to read out lines for people who've already died.

Also, why do adrenaline pills stack? The 40% move bonus stacks exponentially, the damage is basically nonexistent at high levels and they come in stacks of three. Having one of these and a steamthopter on a damage dealer is basically "instakill a unit anywhere on the map". +40% boost is okay for the non-repeatable sprint, though.

Some wierd thing happened regarding accuracy in a vs. I played. I was on one of my custom maps (a very tight map where the whole floor is ice) when suddenly, amidst the chaos, my base accuracy was 80% (75/70% for the Barudits/Rogues) for most of my attacks (never-miss attacks still succeeded). I can confirm that the attacking units weren't blinded.

Board games can still have unclear rulings, so you do have to 'patch' everytime someone does something that doesn't have clear rulings. Though CCGs are more likely to be affected by it, it can still happen for boardgames

Also, it should be possible to use melt (if enough energy is there) if the user is frozen to thaw himself out. That'd make sense to me and also helps out a little to deal with multiple icy opponents at once (aside from gratitious thermal paste).

It feels in general that turning energy into XP with repeatable actions is a little broken. At the end of a scenario, characters might as well spend turns buffing and using spells to gain significant free XP.

Tying XP just to damage and healing might fix this, since damage is more bounded -- once you inflict enough damage, the scenario ends.

How about making the skills yield less XP the more often they are used?